The Subprimes (11 page)

Two families a day were now rolling into Valence. They had somehow skirted the border credit checks or found a back road into Nevada, bypassing the gilded tourist mecca of a previous age, Las Vegas, still strobe-lit and neon-suffused but now haunted only by European tourists and those who really did not have much to lose. The serious gamblers, the one-percenters looking to try their luck, avoided Vegas, preferring the legalized gambling meccas now spread across deregulated America.

Sargam noticed that each new family came warily, as if expecting to be turned away, asking humbly for a night's lodging, a place to light a fire and open a can of chili, heat a tortilla. She saw them nod with surprise, their eyes widening, when they were told to pick an empty house and make it their own, offered a seat around a campfire, a cold beer or a mason jar of lemonade thrust into their hands. And she saw hope and confidence restored as the men and women listened to what was offered here: some fracking work if they were lucky; plenty of fieldwork if they weren't. There were green beans, spinach, carrots, and onions to bring in. If they had a few dollars to put into the community fund for lentils, rice, and beans, the community would take it. If not, all they had to give was their backs for an honest day's work.

It made sense in a way that nothing had in a long time. There was no anxiety over credit scores or being hauled in on a collection notice and sent to credit rehab. Nobody had Internet access, and for the first time they did not miss it. Nobody had a working cell phone, but neither did anyone whom they might have wanted to call.

Sargam watched new families settle into abandoned structures and gradually transform them into homes. She saw smiles return to children's faces, the weight lifted from their young shoulders. And she saw the fathers come back from a day's work with some folding money and their wives, those who weren't also working, returning from the marketing with detergent.

Old couples showed up, senior citizens driving beat-up jalopies, asking for water, a place to sleep. There were murmurs in the community about letting in the old and the infirm. Darren was among those who argued that they needed workers and could not support freeloaders. Sargam insisted they take in all who wanted to come, even if they were in need.

“If we reject folks for being old or sick, we're no better than a bank or a credit agency. We need to do the right thing, that's got to be our guiding principle. People helping people.”

“Or people dragging people down,” Darren said.

“
Or
all we've found is a smaller version of that shitty world we're leaving behind.”

DARREN AND SARGAM HAD THEIR
first argument over whether or not there should be any governing structure in Valence. They were sitting on her sleeping bag in her house, both freshly washed after trips to the pump. Darren was pointing out how, for example, the pump was getting so crowded in the early evenings that perhaps they should assign different time slots to different streets. Sargam urged against it. And while Darren had initially been opposed, he said he had begun to see the need for some organization. Despite his own status pre-Sargam, he now said he believed that the number of single, unattached men should be kept to a minimum. There had to be strict prohibitions against fighting. And each family had to contribute four days, or nights, a week to farming the parcels. The Commons, as Darren had taken to calling the land, required steady maintenance and work. The leafy greens attracted all kinds of scavenging herbivores. The erection of a fence, Darren said, was essential to the community's survival, a project the scale of which required community-wide cooperation. And there had to be designated latrines.

“We have fifty families here, a few hundred folks, we need some way to keep tabs, to encourage participation, to keep the focus on the community,” Darren said.

“No, let it evolve. Trial and error.”

“We'll be buried in shit.”

His night-soil program was his first attempt at community-wide organization. He had five bathtubs broken out of bathrooms, removed to a high point, and then covered with planks. Ripping the drains out of the houses was more difficult, requiring a week of digging in the hot sun and stripping the pipes from the earth, but once he had assembled a few hundred meters, he ran pipe from the bathtub drains into the fields. “You shit in a bucket, you slop the bucket out in the baths,” he said. “It's easier than digging a hole.” He also wanted the chicken shit scraped up and tossed in, along with any other organic waste.

He had the kids spend the better part of a week looking for earthworms, which he poured into the covered tubs. The worms made a meal of the feces, turning that into soil, while the runoff—worm urine—was a potent and highly effective fertilizer.

He pointed out to Sargam the success of this program, that it proved the community was capable of following a few rules.

“But these are folks who were beaten by rules,” Sargam said, “who ran from the rules, who've been told all their lives that they were breaking rules.”

“How can we keep growing if folks won't do their part?” Darren asked.

“They will, you have to talk to them. Don't tell them they have to do this or that, but include them.”

Darren thought this over. “You mean explain?”

“Yeah, explain what needs to be done, and tell them we have to work together to get it done. Don't become a rule maker, that's like a boss. These folks have had enough of all that.”

Darren nodded. “Can't hurt to try.”

He took Sargam in his arms, kissing her behind the ear and down the neck.

She pulled away. “Hmm, we gotta go eat.”

“You're in such a hurry to get some beans you would leave me all hot and bothered?”

“Trust me, I'm a much sweeter girl on a full stomach.”

But Sargam did notice a change coming over her. She was still fond of Darren, found him attractive, but lately she had felt a lessening of desire, a withdrawal from the need for rutting and rubbing. At first she wondered if she was with child, but her period had arrived a few days later. The more involved she was becoming in the community, the more time she spent with the men and women of Valence, talking to them, advising them, listening to them, the less she wanted to be with any one man. If Darren was aware of her decreasing ardor, he kept it to himself. There was so much about Sargam that he didn't understand.

While it was Darren who worried over the technical and engineering issues of their small community, it was Sargam who was emerging as the spiritual leader. The women enjoyed her company, and enjoyed sharing their confidences with her. An Ecuadorean woman, Milla, told her she suspected her husband had eyes for the lady from Hemmet who squatted next door. That bad neighbor had been flirting with her husband at night around the campfire and complimenting him on his appearance, even how he fit his jeans. Milla told Sargam she had not stuck with him through two thousand miles of bad road only to lose him to a pale
gordita
. Sargam assured her that she would talk to the woman and urged her to be patient, to be kind to her husband and give him no reason to stray.

Sargam sidled up to the woman in question the next day while they were on their knees, plucking green beans from the vine, and asked her if she liked Valence.

“It's not a matter of like, is it?” the woman, Maureen, said. “It's a matter of we can stay here. Live here without fear of being run off.”

“It is, but we have to work at it,” Sargam said.

“I'm working.” Maureen showed her apron full of beans.

“Yes, but we also have to work spiritually. To let go of a little bit of ourselves, our ego, so that we can live this way.”

Maureen sat up and wiped her forehead. “What are you getting at?”

“What we are doing, making a community, takes great personal strength and character. We have to love our neighbors, to respect our fellow men and women, and perhaps be very sensitive to the feelings of those around us. This isn't just another Ryanville, this is a home. So respect your neighbor.”

Maureen squinted, not sure if Sargam was being specific or general, but she nodded. Maureen could see that Sargam was a pretty woman, even beautiful, but somehow she posed no threat and offered no competition. And she now understood that Sargam knew she had flirted with her neighbor.

“I got you,” Maureen said. “It's just old habits.”

“That's what we need to lose, those old habits. That old world. What we're doing here is for us, people helping people, and if we can make this work, then we'll have done something we can be proud of, without knowing anyone's damn credit score. Let the coasts sink into the ocean. We're learning how to get by on our own.”

Maureen nodded, suddenly proud of her little part in this community.

For Sargam, this was one of a dozen visits she would make during the day, bringing peace to squabbling children, calming a woman who was panicky at not being able to call or text her sister, reconciling a feuding husband and wife. She was a soothing presence, and the community waited anxiously for her to turn up at campfire every night, where she would sit down wherever there was space, seemingly unaware of the role she was increasingly coming to play.

When she told Darren that what they needed more than any rules was a proper school, he thought of a few dozen projects he considered more urgent, but then he saw the look in her eyes and nodded, yes, she was right.

SARGAM WATCHED THEM ROLL OFF
the ramp and onto Bienvenida, the main street, the Flex listing on an undersized spare, the hood tied down with rope. Jeb at the wheel, and Bailey beside him, Vanessa, looking even more grown in the backseat and beside her the boy, looking about. When he saw Sargam stepping into the street he opened his mouth in surprise.

They had kept this street clear, the house fronts unmodified, the brown lawns unwatered, so that the first impression anyone had on exiting the highway was of an abandoned subdivision, no different from a hundred thousand such wastelands across the country. Sargam was walking across Valence to see a woman worried her son was going too wild. As she approached the curb, the Flex halted and all four jumped out simultaneously, their voices swirling together.

They looked even more bedraggled than when she had last seen them: Jeb in a greasy T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of work boots; Bailey in a blouse and shorts; Vanessa wearing an old sundress she'd found somewhere, one shoulder strap hanging down over her arm; and the boy in too-short jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of sneakers three sizes too big. They were bonier than Sargam remembered, hunger and exhaustion wafting off them. It was a miracle they had made it this far.

Sargam hugged each of them, and listened to where they had been and what they had been doing: back to Los Angeles, back to Riverside, stops at a half-dozen Ryanvilles, some part-time work building one of the new elevated expressways along the
coastal corridor, taking a southern route out of California they had heard about, through Arizona and then up into Nevada. They had heard about Valence, a few folks had, as a place where you could find a little house, maybe some work, and live in peace. No one running you off every three days. And they heard there were dances and good food.

Sargam nodded. “We're trying.”

“You're famous,” the boy said. “We heard talk about you in the last Ryanville. That you were teaching folks a new way of living.”

Sargam laughed. “Not a new way, an old way, a basic way.”

“And we never said a word that you were the lady who conked that guy on the head, brained him.”

“Quiet, boy,” said Jeb. “Don't mind him.” He turned back to Sargam. “But we did hear about you.”

“About this pretty lady running a community out in the desert,” Bailey added.

“They were here before me,” Sargam said. “Come on, I'll show you around. There's still a few houses up on Las Lomas, that's four blocks up and to the right.”

“My kids are hungry,” Bailey said in a small voice.

“Of course.” Sargam told them to pull the Flex up to the next corner and turn right. There was a kitchen up there and lunch was almost ready.

They were handed plastic plates with beans, rice, green beans, cooked spinach, and scrambled eggs. The family took seats on long, split logs and ate while other members of the community coming in from the fields joined them. New families came in every day, and sating their hunger set them at ease. There were more Californians turning up, even a couple of families from Riverside. Jeb and Bailey sighed deeply and talked for the first time in months about matters other than
who might be hiring or whether there was a water tap or who might have made off with their last good cooking pot. Vanessa sat quietly apart from her parents, but she perked up when a handsome young man, perhaps a year older than she was, dirty blond hair and a gap in his teeth, appeared with a soccer ball and started a little kick-around. Soon, more boys and girls were playing soccer on the scrubby patch between the campfire flat and the fields.

The food was good and filling, and after cleaning his plate and drinking a mug full of water, the boy, Tom, could not resist and ran to join the other children playing soccer. Bailey was about to shout at him not to run on a full stomach, but watching him stalk the ball with his serious, consumed expression, she decided to let him play, for once, just let him play.

SARGAM TOOK THEM TO THE
house on Las Lomas. It was not much, three bedrooms that needed a long and hard scrubbing, a living room with filthy carpeting, and a kitchen long ago stripped of appliances and copper piping. But it was a roof and four walls, a front door, the water main down the long, curving street.

They would be sleeping on the floor. Washing in cold water. And Sargam could promise nothing but hard work for little money. They would get what everybody else got, no more, no less. But nobody was going to run their credit or treat them like dirt because they were in debt.